User blog:Aamuaurinko/judar's childhood thoughts (snb spoilers)
I posted this originally on my pillowfort blog at: https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/978073 . But I thought, why not copy it here? May this be an example of what kinds of analysis posts you could write in the blogs. "something that i think is pretty underrated and underanalyzed in the magi fandom is most of the things related to Sinbad no Bouken. now i get not everyone has read it especially because it hasn't been fully typeset (although translations have existed for over a year fyi). and i saw some people saying LAST WEEK that the "sinbad manga is still ongoing". no it's not. googling takes two seconds. anyways, there are a million analyzing posts about the characters of magi on tumblr, but i rarely see people talk about snb characters in length. i'm kind of guilty myself as well because i don't remember everything about snb and therefore find it difficult to participate in those conversations. still, i thought that i'd discuss a little bit about Judar's childhood and timeline, which are of course things that are related to snb since that's where we see kid Judar. It's already explained in Magi that when Judar was born in a poor Kou mountain village, Al-Thamen showed up, killed his parents, kidnapped him, and burned the whole village down. This is well known and much explored in text posts and fanfics. What is not very well explained is what exactly his upbringing in the organization was like. This is something that people have their own theories and headcanons about, sometimes even ignoring the canonical information provided by SnB. Maybe ignoring accidentally or on purpose. In fanon, you can of course do whatever you want. But looking at the facts we get. From a very young age, Judar had a close connection to Gyokuen. It was undoubtedly Gyokuen's intention to raise Judar in the sort of way that he would always trust her, and never doubt. Be dependent on her. So even before Judar was taken to the Kou imperial palace, where Gyokuen was the empress, he met Gyokuen a lot. To the point that Gyokuen ended up becoming a mother figure to him. The things that are told to us about kid Judar and Gyokuen's relationship indicate just how much Gyokuen was inhabiting that "parent" role for Judar. Like when it's said that when Judar was a child, he wanted to marry Gyokuen. It's not that uncommon for a child to want to marry one of their parents. That is basically an indication of "I love my parent and I want to be with them forever, therefore I want to marry them because that's what people who love each other do". THAT is how Judar saw Gyokuen. You can also see this being expressed on Gyokuen's part. During Hakuryuu and Judar's battle against Gyokuen, Gyokuen says that she "raised you with so much love". Curse the English language for not differentiating between singular and plural you, and me not knowing Japanese, but considering that she adresses them both at first, and they react with the same "furious out of his senses" expression, I'm assuming she was referring to them both. And that's just how it is. Gyokuen was Hakuryuu's mother, not Judar's. But she did raise him, had his respect more that anyone else in Al-Thamen, and was consciously or subconsciously the one filling the role of a mother to him. It's no wonder than when Judar learned about his past, it all culminated in a hatred towards Gyokuen specifically. Judar never denounced the entirety of Al-Thamen or turned against anyone else in it or really even cared about anyone else in it. He knew that Gyokuen was the leader, Gyokuen was the one who he had a special connection to, and Gyokuen was the one who had betrayed him. So this was the focus in Magi, which is why it was interesting to see that in SnB, Judar was always in Falan's company instead. In Parthevia. On the other side of the world compared to the Kou Empire. And even though Judar hadn't been taken to the Kou Empire yet, he was still wearing Kou style clothes and fancy priest robes. I guess they knew exactly what they wanted to do with him. Al-Thamen's plans can roughly be divided into four categories: #The general causing of chaos and war around the world, setting up puppet leaders, and distributing Black Metal Vessels, #Falan's plan to get Ill-Ilah to descend on the First Kingdom of Sindria by causing a massive concentration of black rukh appear as a result of the island's total annihilation, #Ithnan's plan to work with Magnostadt, and get Ill-Ilah to descend there (well they continued this even when Ithnan was dead so it wasn't really his plan but the plan he was the most involved with), #Gyokuen's plan to take over the Kou Empire and cause Ill-Ilah's descend through that. And Judar was, in some way or another, involved with all of these. Plan number one is obvious; that's how Judar gets introduced to us for the first time in Magi. He was supposed to take Jamil to Amon's dungeon, and turn Jamil into Qishan's metal vessel wielding puppet leader. Judar was also involved when Black Metal Vessels were given to Serendine and Cassim. When it comes to number three, Judar had the least amount of involvement. Mostly about the fact that the Black Metal Vessels were created together with Magnostadt. Number two is what SnB is all about. I'm assuming that Judar knew all of the Al-Thamen members with distinct personalities well enough, and that they taught magic to him. Judar does similar thunder spells as Ithnan, for instance. With Falan, I think it's the most obvious. Barbarossa had two of Judar's djinns. We see a four-year-old Judar with white rukh trying to sleep in Parthevia, but the rukh is too noisy as there is a battle going on. Judar is always accompanied by Parthevia's court magician Falan. This has led me to assume (to have my own headcanon, dare I say) that Judar lived those three or maybe even more years mostly in Parthevia, under Falan's watch. He must have visited elsewhere often though, raising dungeons and getting influenced by Gyokuen. And he did always keep wearing those Kou clothes. There is something I think about occasionally that makes me shiver a bit. Judar had white rukh at the age of four. When he was six, it was black. Again, from Magi we know that it was Gyokuen who used her depravity magic (the same thing as the curse put on Sinbad that didn't work though) to force Judar to fall. I wonder how that went. He didn't SEEM to have any trauma at least. Even though Falan looked after Judar most of the time during those three or so years, she didn't really seem to care about him much. Falan, who projected her deceased son Tess on Parthevia's prince Ceylan. You'd think that she would have got the protective instincts toward the child she was supposed to look after - that is, Judar - but she didn't. I joked in a Magi discord that maybe Judar was just too much of a brat for her, but I'm seriously curious. That's the only explanation I could come up with: Judar's personality was too different from Tess'. Falan also seems to see Judar as an asset, a pawn, or a weapon. Not really a person whose feelings you should care about. Luckily for her, that's how Judar was raised. To do this and that plan and follow the orders. Judar's time in Parthevia was probably the first time he got a taste of "Choosing Your Own King" in Serendine. Judar was enthusiastically teaching Serendine how to use Zepar, and the little omake comics of Judar holding her hand and saying he doesn't need any other friends are very cute. I don't believe that Judar understood that what he was doing (= playing two teams and ultimtely being on Barbarossa's side) was so bad. Especially bad for Serendine. He doesn't understand that he's been helping Serendine's worst enemy, and that she would SERIOUSLY have a problem with that. That is why, when Serendine declared Judar to be her enemy as well, Judar reacts with a shock. He just didn't understand what was going on. But can you blame him, he was seven. After that it was pursuing Sinbad, pursuing Hakuryuu... speaking of Hakuryuu, or rather, Kou. After Falan's failed plan to summon Ill-Ilah, where she ends up summoning David instead and gets force choked to death by him, Judar returns to Gyokuen. This is how Gyokuen phrases it. "The Magi has returned to me". And after this, Judar was fully under Gyokuen's influence. And this is when he gets tied to plan number four. As mentioned above, Judar is now seven. This is when he's taken to the Kou imperial palace and made a High Priest of the country. Hakutoku, Hakuyuu, and Hakuren are still alive, but the brothers start to suspect something strange with their "mother". When Gyokuen introduced the empire to Judar for the first time, Judar points out that there is something special in Hakuyuu and Hakuren. Gyokuen prohibits Judar from taking those two to a dungeon. Judar didn't seem to be familiar with the imperial family before this. During this year, Judar takes Kouen to a dungeon. He's eight when he's taking Kouen to his second one, and during this time Hakuyuu and Hakuren are killed, and Hakuryuu is injured. After this, Hakuryuu turns his back on Judar entirely, as he sees him as his mother's pawn. Hakuryuu does, however, appreciate that Judar is the only person who treats him the way he did before the fire. In the following years, Judar raises dungeons and takes at least Kouen, Koumei, Kouha, Kougyoku, and Hakuei to a dungeon. There might be some other Al-Thamen puppet leaders like Jamil but if so, they are never mentioned. The final battle implies that there are no more metal vessel users than those that we know of. Judar was spoiled and pampered in the palace. Everyone around there let him so whatever he wanted (the pursuit of whatever kinds of relationships is specifically mentioned), although he still had to do Al-Thamen's work. Freedom in the palace and luxury in exchange of doing whatever Al-Thamen wants him to. Well, Judar did grow to understand the value of true freedom, out of Al-Thamen's control. And he felt jealous for not having had that freedom before. And this ties up pretty much to the stuff that is explained in Magi. Judar does, of course, end up accepting that what happened, happened, and he has a positive outlook on his future. This whole text was inspired by 1) me trying to understand Magi timeline, 2) me seeing fanarts where the Al-Thamen priests and Ithnan teach little Judar to walk etc. And I was just kind of hit with the realization that yeah, they had to do that. :D This ended up being way longer than I expected but I wanted to write it down." Category:Blog posts Category:Fanon